Survivor: Extrasolar planet escapes stellar attack
By Ron Cowen
From the sizzling outer atmosphere of a sunlike star to the chilly surroundings of a dark, stellar cinder, extrasolar planets keep turning up in the darndest places.
Now astronomers have found a large planet that survived a special type of onslaught. The planet, more than 3 times as heavy as Jupiter, was at one time orbiting the elderly star V391 Pegasi at Earth’s distance from the sun. When the aging star ballooned to more than 100 times its former diameter, the giant planet drifted farther away, escaping engulfment. Roberto Silvotti of the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, and his colleagues describe this sequence of events in the Sept 13 Nature.